Love Is

Someone recently read my blog Love is Not and asked me what I thought love is. I told them that I would think about it "when I have time" and then half way through my Spanish Lit class, only a few hours later, as the unfocused drone of my mumbling professor began to invade my soul, the question came back to me, and I wrote this in the back of my notebook:

Love is more than a light bulb moment—it’s a slow flood of heat from toes upward. It’s a backward black hole blinded dive; love is a decision, a mixing up and sorting out of self, a process. Love is negotiating skin and soul, a chemistry, all the feathers of a drooping phoenix, a thing that lives and breathes, goes up in flames, and is reborn inside you as naked and vulnerable as an egg. Love is made of steely bird bones. Love is an inconvenient tumor, the most beautiful disease. It’s holding hands and growing up, words, warm blankets and low light. Love is learning, reading flesh and eyes, a kind of literature, history, psychology, it’s manual labor. Love is a place to cry, an open wound, a puzzle piece, an ocean. It’s an accumulation of little things that stack up in your bones and hold you up, weigh you down, peek out of your pores. Love is dissolving voluntarily, a jelly soft shudder through your stupid, incomplete soul, a contract, a pathway, a box overflowing with dirt and twigs, rusted nails and bits of cotton, cardboard, glue, wood and temptation. Love is a child’s toy, something made with care, it’s a thing that’s not been practiced, drawn, planned; love is an accident as startling as the Earth. Love is gray clay and warm hands. Love is a dirty habit, groggy contentment and messy hair, the taste of sweat, an unraveling.